Agricultural practices help stem effects of climate change

Aug. 23, 2013

An Amish wheat field is seen in Waterford in Knox County / Todd Hill/ Central Ohio.com

Written by

Todd Hill

CentralOhio.com

Ohio’s changing climate

To show how Ohio’s climate and environment are changing, the Media Network of Central Ohio sought concrete examples showing the state’s environment isn’t what it used to be, regardless of the cause. During the course of a week, we will present several of these examples, but we know we can’t hit them all. If you have a story about the environment to share, tell us via our Facebook page. All the stories from the series will be posted to MarionStar.com/climate.

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Some scientists call it global warming, others prefer the more comprehensive phrase “climate change.” Some people harbor little doubt that it’s happening, others are just as certain that it isn’t.

There’s no doubt, however, that extreme precipitation events, from drought to excessive rainfall, have become commonplace in Ohio over recent years, challenging agricultural producers from large corporate operations to small-scale Amish farms.

“Not everybody, in agriculture, industry or government, agrees on what is happening. But they’re finding that they have to address adverse weather conditions,” said Dale Arnold, director of energy policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau.

While Amish communities in Ohio have a well-established reputation for resisting change on a variety of levels, they are adapting some of the same new agricultural practices as their English neighbors as they strive to remain productive and viable.

At the same time, because of their conservative beliefs, as well as other logistical considerations, they may have issues with certain technologies that others may not.

“The Amish do what they can on a small scale. If something requires a lot of dollars to adopt, that’s a problem for them. Technology that requires large outlays is problematic. They don’t have thousands of acres to spread the cost of the technology,” said Dean Slates, a program assistant for the Holmes County Soil and Water Conservation District and a retired extension agent.

“Their power requirements for technology are limited to what a horse can do.”

With an estimated population of 63,990, 474 church districts and 54 settlements as of 2012, Ohio is home to more Amish than any other state, according to the book “The Amish,” by Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner and Steven M. Nolt and published this summer by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Today’s new environmental challenges are the same for every farmer in the state, however, whether they’re Amish or English.

“Keeping water in the soil in is the focus,” said Arnold, who also is a member of the Ohio Climate Change Dialogue Group. “In any 10-year period, you’re going to have two to three summers of drought followed by one to two extremely wet years.”

“Nature doesn’t like extremes, it prefers a constant. Soils around here are very protective of water if that water is forced to take a tortuous path through the soil. The soil will filter and remove any contaminants,” Mark Wilson, president of Land Stewards LLC, an agronomic and environmental services group in Marion, said.

“It’s important to talk about drainage not as a drainage problem, but a soil health problem.”

“Amish farms have bought into agricultural drainage in a big way,” Arnold said. “They are very well-read. They’re adapting and doing things with hybrids and tiling and sub-surface drainage.”

A highly effective means of keeping water in the soil, conservation tillage, which can describe no-till plowing as well as the utilization of cover crops over the winter, took off in popularity during the 1970s once farm equipment and herbicides caught up with the concept.

“They’re doing a great deal in terms of conservation tillage. Their use of plastic wrap may be weather-related,” Slates said of the Amish, who have traditionally devoted much of their acreage to the growing of produce vegetables.

In the Holmes County community of Winesburg, an Amish food manufacturer, Alpine Cheese Co., has since 2007 utilized a pollution-trading mechanism familiar to the energy industries, particularly power plants, to address its effluent issues.

“Cheese plants tend to discharge a lot of whey. To expand production, they needed to lower their phosphorous discharge. The equipment was very expensive, so they looked into water-quality trading,” said Michelle Wood, program administrator for the Holmes County Soil and Water Conservation District.

“A pool of money was put together to reduce pollution input from farmers in the Sugar Creek watershed so Alpine’s effluent could go out higher,” Slates said. “The cheese plant was using this as kind of an insurance plan.”

“The farmers liked working with a local company,” Wood said. “Many of these dairy farms were sending their milk there already, so it made a nice kind of circle.”

“When it comes to hybrids, there may be church constraints,” he said. “Some churches are fine with them and others are not. They mirror the general public. Many English have issues with them.”

This year 85 percent of the corn planted in Ohio was genetically engineered, according to the USDA, up from 9 percent in 2000. Eighty-nine percent of the state’s soybean crop this year was genetically engineered, compared to 48 percent in 2000.

“We’re seeing a lot of fluctuations in a variety of weather patterns that frankly I don’t have a handle on, but I will say that the hybrids being bred by geneticists are more tolerable of wide swings,” Wilson said.

“Drought-resistant characteristics are being bred into them. They’re more forgiving.”

Greater temperature extremes, in part, also have led Ohio’s agricultural producers, both English and Amish, to vastly alter their livestock and animal husbandry practices over the past couple of decades.

“Years ago you mostly just had a shelter barn. It’s gone from open range with chicken, pork and cattle to barns and brooder huts. There’s been a lot of investment in HVAC to make these inside areas cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. The vast majority of farmers are doing that,” Arnold said.

Amish farmers are not necessarily on board with the prevailing view among English agricultural producers that the climate is actually changing.

Last year Richard Moore and Rachel Hintz of Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster conducted an extension of a 2011 Iowa survey that found that 83 percent of the Amish who responded thought there was insufficient evidence to determine if climate change is occurring, compared to 47 percent among non-Amish farmers.

The researchers noted, however, that only 12 surveys from the Amish were returned.

“There will always be traditional cycles of drought and rain,” Arnold said. “The issue is how we can adapt through technology for planting and husbandry to strike that balance.”